


2084

by kuro49



Category: Batman - All Media Types, DCU
Genre: Alternate Universe - Future, Immortality, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-31
Updated: 2019-08-31
Packaged: 2020-08-19 13:54:27
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,229
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20210857
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kuro49/pseuds/kuro49
Summary: Some bats live an eternity. Or, the one where Dick and Jason hosts a dinner party.





	2084

**Author's Note:**

  * For [3isme](https://archiveofourown.org/users/3isme/gifts).

> prompt: _Talon Dick is basically immortal. Good thing he has League of Assassins Zombie Jason keeping him company. That's the basic thing. Other things that can happen: Neither are really sure if Damian's deal with the devil (Batman 666 style) is a really good idea. And is that a digital version of Tim downloaded onto a USB? Cass and Kate are probably still running around somewhere - Lazarus Pit juice, they've found, lasts a really long time. They can always double check with the all-knowing AI Oracle floating around earth's satellites._
> 
> i wish i was clever enough to bring all the other bats in but alas i'm not. thank you to 3isme for dropping this prompt, i think it might be the coolest damn take i've seen on immortal batkids.

0.

This is probably not the legacy Bruce Wayne had in mind when he first donned the Batman moniker.

But then again he probably isn’t thinking of anything at all aside from the warm cascade of his parents’ blood splattered across his cheek. In crescendo to the scatter of pearls torn from his mother’s necklace to the solid drop of his father’s full weight crumbling to the ground, it amounts to the thought of how he doesn’t fall with them.

Laying down this foundation for his children.

Planting seeds in a garden that he will never see.

The twisting foliage to come of this would be enough to make even Poison Ivy envious. There is dirt on his hands and all the water in Gotham’s Bay couldn’t begin to wash away the resulting mess. Maybe it is a good thing Bruce Wayne doesn’t live long enough to see any of this.

Maybe it is a good thing Bruce Wayne had to die to have any of these roots taking hold to grow and grow and grow. 

1.

Batman takes flight, night after night. A permanent fixture in the Gotham skies.

This Batman kills out of necessity. But that is not new.

Damian Wayne sees a shadow of the man he once called his very own Batman from across the ledge.

Dick Grayson’s eyes glint gold, and what is left over of the man that remains when Talon fills his veins stands still for one short moment before he is waving. A friendly little motion and Talon even goes as far as to take a small step forward. The balls of his feet and the precarious balance he maintains are the only things keeping him on the ledge of the roof instead of sailing through the air to a near-eighty feet drop.

His frame cuts a particularly dark shadow across the Gotham rooftops, dragging longer and far more menacing than a bedtime story has any right to be.

This is what Damian hates.

From the start: When Dick was still just Grayson and throwing his arms around him to call him little D with an unpredictability that throws Damian off-kilter. It still feels although the ground has been pulled from beneath his feet, even all the way to the very end when Dick just goes by Talon and he is pressing the clean edge of his knife to Damian's throat despite the armour in the high collar of his Batsuit. Blinking down at Damian behind the lenses of his gold accented mask cracked underneath the force of Damian's retaliation to reveal the face of a missing older sibling.

It would seem like a concerning pattern when his older brothers keep disappearing like little boys stolen in the night only to come back years later as someone else's misplaced toys. Puppet strings not cut all the way through.

Talon doesn't bring his hand down from his casual wave, he pulls his hand higher until his arm is extended up then back. A small object is thrown, arching through the drop between them on a long precise projectile path.

Damian snatches it out of the air while Talon calls out. “A gift for you.”

It’s tentative but it’s the same low gravel of Batman's voice through and through when he eyes the small thin USB stick sitting in his palm. “From?”

Talon smiles, the darker lines of his veins pulling across his cheeks with it. “Your brothers.”

Dick doesn’t see the way Damian narrows his eyes beneath the cowl but it is felt, the substantiality of those words fitting like especially nasty pieces wedging into a space not made for any. Damian slips the USB into a pouch at his belt, nodding almost stoically at Talon while the other man waves again, another enthusiastic gesture that deflates in the distance between the two of them. 

Pulling further still when Damian turns around with a sweep of his coat tail.

He doesn’t respond to the call of _ don’t forget Saturday _ from behind him.

2.

It's cool, it's damp, it's what he knows.

The stalactites are dripping from above while the stalagmites are rising from below. This home is still a home despite the wear and tear. Signified by the last few standing walls of a Manor above, battered through the years and held up like a headstone for a body buried deep beneath the ground.

“Do they hate me this much.” Damian mutters under his breath, and he wishes it was just to himself, but the answering laugh coming from the Batcomputer says, decidedly, otherwise. 

Tim Drake’s laugh doesn’t come out of the speakers staticky or even broken in turns. It is smooth, a tumbling sound that fills out all the spaces of the cave that remains. He sounds like himself, and Damian has to say that that might be the worst part.

“They just think you need help.” Tim tells him, and there is no sincere need for a hello. 

“Help.” Damian repeats, biting out the word like it holds a particularly bitter taste.

“They thought if you had help, you wouldn’t have made some of the, uh, choices that you did.” It is the same wispy boyband hair that falls into his eyes that has irked Damian since that very first time he met Drake. “Y’know, that whole deal with the devil.” Tim keeps going with a hand motion that is all Timothy Jackson Drake, it's uncanny, and Damian has seen a lot of fucked up shit. “They love you really.”

Damian holds Tim’s gaze, his image shifting as he moves on screen, until he finally says: “Really.”

It’s a question even without the question mark.

A family fractured is still a family held by its broken bits.

Damian has a hard time hearing it but belief works in a very different way. He doesn't slouch in his seat but he does sit back far enough for Alfred to jump from his perch at the edge of the desk down into his lap. Damian doesn't sulk as he pets through the black fur of Alfred's coat, the cat rumbling with a purr when his fingers find just the right spot beneath Alfred's chin to have the cat's entire body leaning into his palm.

“Really.” Tim promises, warmth in the unfaltering pixels of his eyes, steel in his voice, catching Alfred's squint.

It carries in all this empty space. 

3.

“Oracle, report.”

The display in his scanner shows nothing but then again this is hardly the first time Killer Croc was able to bypass his machines but nothing slips through Oracle's all seeing eyes from beyond even the Gotham skies.

_ Negative_, comes Oracle's reply for the here and the now. Her answer coming up at the edge of his cowl's lenses, indicating a latitude and longitude to Killer Croc's present location that isn't anywhere close to Damian's current one.

Damian huffs, wadding back towards the sewer entrance. It’s slow and it smells and it's nothing fucking new until he puts Waylon down for good. Like with all the history of Gotham’s worst villains, this one isn’t a path to redemption. You eat one man, you get hungry for another. And by the count of maybe half a dozen, it’s too late and you probably have a taste for human flesh.

“Kid.”

It gives Damian the creeps that this single word comes out near fond. Or as close to that descriptor as either one of them understand the word to mean. Funnier still, maybe if either one of them knows the right way to laugh, is the juxtaposition, the way Damian stands taller, broader, looking far older through the correct passage of time placed on a stand still now while Jason Todd's had stopped a long time ago.

“Todd.” He answers in greeting when he finds Jason standing just out of splashing distance of the sludge running through Gotham's heart. 

Jason is not in the clothes Damian is most familiar with, out from the pull of the Lazarus Pit and away from the League’s influence, Jason is dressed down and in all black, cradling a red motorcycle helmet underneath one arm.

“Anything I should know?” 

“About?”

“Saturday.”

“You’re the one in charge." He states but it is a question all the same.

“Were you expecting burning bricks of my apartment building served for dinner instead? Because that's what you'll be eating if Dick's in charge.” Jason damn near sneers at him for that insinuation alone. And that’s fair even if Damian will never admit to it. “Didn’t you grow up eating Alfred’s good stuff? Or did you trade off your taste buds too?”

Damian gets a string of _ hahahahahahaha _across his lenses display from Oracle as she chimes in on what she thinks of that particular choice he made. It seems like everyone has a piece to say. In hindsight, there are deals that are made, and there are deals that you do not go back on. This one sealed is definitely something of the latter.

Damian settles for gritting out. “You’ll be adequate.”

Jason levels a stare at him, his eyes glimmering those last few sparks of what remains of his Grandfather's legacy.

"Tell O she’s invited.”

Damian pulls his mouth into a flat line at him. But Jason is also not the one waist deep in sewage waste. When Jason pulls his mouth into the nastiest grin right back, saying in that way that words cannot convey: Oh, he can wait. Damian nearly punches out the bricks holding this sewage entrance open if just to get it caving in on himself.

_ Schedule’s open just for you, handsome_, Oracle messages and Damian voices her response with a grit to his teeth. “She’ll be there.”

Damian watches as Jason turns to leave, laughing as he does, slipping on the helmet while he climbs back on to his motorcycle.

_ See you, Barbie_. He tells her, grin still across his face when his own display lights up in response.

From out in space, a satellite in orbit, Oracle answers without fail. _ On the other side, Jay. _

4.

It is Saturday.

And the dietary restriction of the day is vegetarian only. But it seems like the hosts have already had their fill.

“Brothers, huh.”

Damian states, standing in the middle of their living room in his full Batman regalia.

Mouth startling red and wet, Dick pulls back from Jason where they are sprawled along the length of the couch. Talon drags the back of his hand across his mouth, hiding the sharp cut of his grin emptied out of remorse at Damian, and the joke to it doesn't escape anyone in the room because if this is an implication that this is the worst they’ve done, well, the pit for that is dark and deep and he could swim a lifetime measured by their standards and never reach the bottom.

“Hello to you too, brat.”

Jason says, letting go of the death's grip he still has on Dick’s shirt, allowing the Talon to sit up. Jason swipes a tongue across his bottom lip where the hard-earned warmth is fading again while Dick’s own hands retreat from where they were bringing out the rare colour to bloom across his skin from beneath his shirt.

“You only have yourselves to blame, you’re the ones to invite me here in the first place.”

Damian has to physically turn his head to the side to keep from catching every last detail in the way Dick and Jason handles each other, like something tangled so far into one another they may as well be one singular entity. He still remembers those early days when Jason still looked around like he wasn't entirely sure who he is, his memories more-or-less intact from his resurrection but a definite less when placed on a scale of more to less. Damian starkly remembers the way Talon looked pained, as if every scar made to fade from Jason's body appeared all across his own.

“Babs?” Dick asks instead, smoothing a hand down Jason's shirt in a lousy attempt to fix the wrinkles that have no chance of coming out.

Damian nods at the laptop already set up at the dinner table, a rickety thing barely standing on its last legs. “Here's Drake too.”

"You haven't deleted the replacement."

"You say that like you're surprised, Todd." Damian answers, his voice holding even as he takes the cowl off.

Jason's eyes are narrowed. "And you say that like you don't know what he's capable of."

_You are just upset that he watched you two getting down and dir— _Oracle's mechanical drawl gets cut off as Dick finally gets the USB stick plugged in at the laptop set up on the third try.

"We like Timmy." Dick says, tilting the screen so they can all see.

"You very literally threw him away, Grayson."

When they finally settle down to eat, there are three seats and five bats sitting at the table.

∞. 

“Is that a _ baby_?” 

Dick rushes over to exclaim when he ends up in their apartment with a young child in his arms, all bundled up in a blanket covered in soot. Damian decidedly doesn’t hand the kid to Talon, instead bypassing his eldest brother to drop it into Jason’s lap, making the introductions to the both of them as needed. 

“This,” Damian tells them, “This is McGinnis.”


End file.
